Ojai Potter Finds a Formula for Wealth

When Otto Heino set out to find the long lost formula for an ancient yellow Chinese glaze, he was already a brilliant potter. When he rediscovered it five years ago, he became a rich one as well.

Flush with cash, the 86-year-old Ojai artist has indulged himself with a silver Rolls Royce and a shiny black Bentley that he only drives on Sundays. He has donated $400,000 to the International Museum of Ceramic Art in New York. And he has pledged $300,000 to the Ventura County Museum of History and Art for a new gallery.

His ceramic bottles, listed as high as $25,000 each on the Internet, have been acquired by collectors from Kennebunkport, Maine, to Tokyo to the king of Mustang, a remote region of Nepal bordering Tibet.

Meanwhile, the formula for the buttery glaze remains locked away in Heino’s brain. He destroys all evidence of his ingredients. The plastic bags they come in go straight into the fireplace. And he keeps a wary eye out for rival potters snooping around his shop.

“The answer is right under their nose,” says the hearty New Englander with a laugh.

But when asked for a glimpse of the stuff, Heino stops laughing.

“No, nobody gets to see it,” he says firmly.

Val Cushing, a professor emeritus of pottery and glazes at the New York College of Ceramics at Alfred University, the world’s only institute of ceramic art, said the yellow glaze was popular during China’s Chin Dynasty from AD 265 to 420. But like many other glazes, it was lost over time.

“Glazes were very significant in Chinese culture,” he said. “The Chinese invented high fired ceramics and porcelain.”

But it was the Japanese who kept ceramics alive through the centuries and who still pay handsomely for them. Pottery is the highest art form in Japan, and those who excel are deemed “national treasures,” Cushing said. “Those with that designation can sell small tea bowls for $200,000. And Otto is seen as that kind of artist. When it comes to the amount of money he makes, he’s a real phenomenon.”

A Decade Spent Tinkering in Garage

Heino first heard of the glaze in 1985 while attending a world ceramics conference in Shigaraki, Japan, with his wife and fellow potter, Vivika. They were told the formula for a yellow glaze produced at high temperatures in China had been lost for centuries. The potters were challenged to find it.

Heino and his wife spent a decade in their garage trying to decipher the precise formula.

The problem was at high temperatures, the glazes lost their luster. High fired ceramics are stronger than those fired at lower temperatures. Then, in 1995, just a few months after Vivika died, Heino found the yellow and struck gold.

His luck had turned after analyzing the iron oxide he was using. It was only 60% pure. He went to Spain and found iron oxide that was 99% pure.

“Then I traveled all over the world gathering materials and talking to geologists,” he said.

After much trial and error, he found a substance that, at 2,400 degrees, left a rich yellow color behind. He snapped up 25 pounds of it for $3,000.

Other potters credit Heino for his glaze but feel he might be overstating his achievement.

“There are no new or secret glazes, really,” said Susan Peterson, a retired ceramics professor from USC who has written 11 books on ceramics and taught the subject around the world for 55 years. “But you can rediscover them.”

Ralph Bacerra, who chaired the ceramics departments at the former Chouinard Art Institute and Otis College of Art and Design, said Heino’s real feat was getting a yellow glaze at such high temperatures.

“Usually it burns out, but he has discovered a way to do it. It has a lot of depth to it,” Bacerra said. “It’s not so special to me but to the Asians it’s the color similar to Buddhist and Shinto monks’ robes.”

Bacerra said many noted potters fetch high prices for their work. He has sold pots for $60,000 and said he knows others who sell for more than $100,000.

Cushing, who wrote a book on glazes, said duplicating Heino’s glaze would be difficult but not impossible.

“The Japanese have a tomato red glaze, based on a combination of a red clay and feldspar,” Cushing said. “This particular red clay is in a particular valley and in a particular stream in Japan. So it’s very plausible that Otto has found a mineral that would correspond closely to this.”

Tim Schiffer, executive director of the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, is writing a book about Heino and his art. Heino’s donation to the museum will fund a wing with a rotating exhibit including some of his and Vivika’s pottery.

“It’s too bad there is no one who is apprenticing to him,” Schiffer said. “The way he throws is just astonishing. Ceramics is so unforgiving and so complex. If he were living in Japan he would be a living treasure.”

1,100 Things That Can Go Wrong

Aho Heino grew up in a family of 12 children in East Hampton, Conn. His father was a Finnish immigrant who operated a dairy and tobacco farm.

During World War II, Heino was a gunner on a B-17 bomber based at an airfield in England. It was then that he changed his name from Aho to Otto, on the theory that the German underground would be more inclined to help him if his name sounded familiar. It worked: He was shot down twice and rescued twice.

Heino became interested in pottery after watching celebrated British potter Bernard Leach make cups and mugs.

After the war, Heino and his wife set up shop in Hopkinton, N.H., until Vivika was hired as a ceramics teacher at USC and the Chouinard Art Institute, which later became the California Institute for the Arts. They moved to Ojai in 1969, buying the home of their friend and famed potter Beatrice Wood.

In 1955, Heino was honored by the International Academy of Ceramics in Cannes. And in 1978, he won the gold medal from the International de Ceramique at Vallauris, France. He and his wife’s work have been exhibited at the Smithsonian, the Picasso Museum in France, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“A ceramic engineer will tell you there are 1,100 things that can go wrong in a ceramic piece,” said Peterson, who now lives in Arizona. “Otto is managing an enormous amount of variables and he is one of the most skilled people in the world at what he’s doing.”

One of his repeat customers is Mary Woodman of Kennebunkport, who bought a yellow pot from him for what she said was “between $5,000 and $8,000.”

“The yellow is the hardest glaze to make and I like the buttery color,” said Woodman, an avid pottery collector.

George Wilson, who has known Heino since 1965, once presented one of the yellow bottles to the king of Mustang.

Wilson, 64, is president of Newspapers of New England, a company that owns four papers including the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. He and his wife were visiting a neurosurgeon in Nepal who took them on a rugged hike to Mustang. He had asked Heino earlier for a yellow glazed bottle to give as a gift to the king.

“I presented it to the king and said this is something the Chinese lost and haven’t been able to replicate,” recalled Wilson. “He kept looking at it and feeling it and smiling. He knew it was something very special.”

Wilson has Heino’s pottery all over his house but won’t discuss how much he has paid for it.

“He is almost mystical about where his originality comes from,” Wilson said. “He will tell you it’s not something he is doing but something in the clay.”

Friends say Heino is a gifted raconteur who enjoys telling and retelling stories of his past.

But his craftsmanship speaks for itself.

Wearing a baseball cap and a dirty apron, he drops a large square of gray clay on a spinning potter’s wheel. He works the clay into the shape of a cylinder three or four times.

“Clay is the earth; it’s alive,” he said. “It’s the only live material artists can work with. I let it decide what it will be.”

Heino uses his thumb to etch lines on the piece. At the top he adds his trademark double lip.

“I go through 20 tons of clay a year,” he said. “I don’t sell at any other gallery but here. I make it all myself. The people who buy it want it handmade by me. It adds to the value.”

He makes his own glazes--he recently developed an eggplant-colored one--and adjusts kiln temperatures for the color.

Aside from pottery, cars are Heino’s passion. He buys and restores them, and “Road and Track” magazines litter his workshop.

His walls are festooned with photos of Vivika with himself. Friends say the two were inseparable. The names Otto and Vivika are still often uttered in the same breath.

“I wish she hadn’t died before we started making money,” Heino said absently, setting out a pot to dry. “But the money hasn’t had any real effect on me. You can’t take it with you, you know.”